The authors' hypothesis is called the dispositional hypothesis ,Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973).It states that the social institution of prison is due to the nature of the people who are in charge(the guards and other staff)and the nature of the people who populate it(prisoners).Therefore the purpose of the experiment was to find out the important characteristics of a prison environment, what causes an intense relationship between the guards and the prisoners.
To carry out the experiment, 24 subjects who were physically and mentally stable were chosen from 75 people who responded to a newspaper advert. All were male college students from around the area. Randomly half of the subjects were selected to be prison guards and the other to be prisoners .According to Haney, Banks and Zimbardo(1973), the data analysis was based upon ten prisoners and eleven guards in the experiment. The guards were given khaki shirts and trousers as their uniforms and other required equipment for the job. The prisoners subjects wore loose muslin smock with identification numbers on the front and back.
The' prisoner' subjects remained for …show more content…
One of its strengths is that the mock prison was set up in a way that is exactly like that of an actual prison environment. This made the participants to feel as there are in a real prison. Furthermore the researchers had had control over the whole experiment procedure. On the limitations, ethically the experiment did not fully protect its participants from harm. The results showed that some of the prison subjects became emotionally unstable and depressed in the mock prison. They would have advised the guard subjects to stop being too brutal when it was